Saving my life — One British costume drama at a time.

The Turn of the Screw, and Thoughts on The Unreliable Narrator

OK, Henry James. I read Portrait of a Lady in high school. Meh. I read The Bostonians, which I liked. But I never read The Turn of the Screw. What a great title! I wonder why I never picked it up?

I still haven’t picked it up. But I did pick up the DVD at the library, spurred by the rainy day, the housebound, sick-child-dominated Christmas holidays and the promise of a BBC production featuring familiar, reliable faces (Jodhi May and Colin Firth) .

I’ll make this quick. Colin Firth is in it for 13 seconds max. But that’s OK because I always forget that he kind of disappoints me. Aside from Pride & Prejudice and maybemaybe Bridget Jones (The FIRST one), he’s acty-acty and smirky. The story left me cold as ice and the problem is in the Narrator (main character with no name, let’s call her, oh, let’s see…The Nanny). I guess James writes this story within a story (as the book outlines it) about The Nanny. The main story is told from her point of view, which is a problem for everyone involved because it is never clear if The Nanny is A) mad as a March Hare in a relatively sane world, or B) the only sane person in a crazy, gothic, Brit-lit world of unlit corridors, dark histories and unnamed “things” being done to children.

This was a problem for me because I did not much care either way. In the end a little boy dies and you never know if he was Damien the Demon Seed or the victim of some unknown hysteria. Maybe the book was better. The whole Unreliable Narrator aspect played out as overly dramatic and needlessly apoplectic. Fans of the book are at this very moment drawing in their breath in horror at my callous dismissal of their revered favorite. I apologize. I ejected the DVD player and promptly inserted The Big Lebowski as a palate cleanser. Ahh.

How does this help my life? How does it relate to Lizzie Bennet and what she would do? Well, Henry James started me thinking about Harry James. I downloaded a few Harry James Orchestra songs from the internet. Man alive, he’s tres bitchen. Then I watched How to Marry a Millionaire featuring Betty Grable (aka Mrs. Harry James), a movie in which she acts hilariously idiotic in very cool clothes and makes reference to “good ol Harry James” as she longs to get back to New York. And those two small reactions made me feel just great.